Battletoads, like its predecessor, is a variety game that doesn't do any of the variety stuff well. The closest the gameplay gets to good is during the beat-em-up segments and they aren't without their follies either.

Most of the problems with the gameplay could be waved off if they nailed what they were trying to do with the presentation but it's miserably unfunny most of the time with maybe a sensible chuckle at best, and while I don't hate the artstyle it's not the best thing in the world either.

I AM glad that I forced my friend to play it to completion after literal years of prodding however. What a moment of time Battletoads (2020) will be!

I was born in the mid-80s but my first console was a Genesis, and so games from the 8-bit era - which I saw friends and relatives playing but narrowly missed out on experiencing for myself - hold a kind of mystique for me. I see it as an era of charming jank, a time of experimentation as the steadily-growing home console industry started to find its feet as a medium. Some games flopped, a rare few games hit on the perfect storm of good design and are still iconic today, and I'm realizing more and more that most games ended up like Rygar - where the ideas were great and some parts of the execution were good, but a mix of hardware limitations and naivete meant we ended up with half a good game.

Rygar controls well, with his limited moveset feeling satisfying and tight enough in the moment-to-moment gameplay; however, the other half of the combat - the enemies - are pretty hideously unbalanced, with some being either laughably easy or nearly impossible depending on how you approach them. Pretty early on, you have to face a short enemy on a small platform whose attacks leave you a miniscule timeframe to jump onto the platform, crouch, and kill him before he knocks you off the platform to your death - however, you can take advantage of a glitch by simply walking backwards and causing him to disappear. In a more 'legal' example of this imbalance, most bosses have attack patterns that are extremely difficult to evade but are trivialized if you have access to the 'Attack and Assail' spell that allows you to hit them from anywhere on the screen. This makes most bosses either an easy but tedious exercise in grinding spell charges, or something that requires cuphead levels of precision, with nothing in between. (Thankfully, the game seems to realize how hairy some parts of its difficulty curve are and offers unlimited continues)

The exploration elements of the game are similarly mixed: the gradual opening up of the world through finding items is remarkably polished for such an early game, but there are too many trial-and-error moments (such as knowing to throw your grappling hook upwards without any indication of anything there) for the game to feel fair.

Still a very creditable effort, with the RPG and exploration elements doing enough to distinguish this from the more straightforward arcade original. There's probably an alternate timeline out there where this game released late in the NES lifespan and was more refined as a result, and everyone today talks about "Rygarvanias".

I saw the Game Gear version of this on a video once like 6 or 7 years ago and was utterly fascinated by how awful the music was, so I decided to play it and then I was utterly fascinated by how awful everything else is. For years I would show it to friends just to see their reactions to the music and such, and it never fails to get a laugh out of me even now. Around last year I showed it to a group chat with another user here, XenonNV, who then spread it further and I guess it became an inside joke on the site?? And then somebody ran it at AGDQ as well. Those were both really fucking funny to see, it's crazy when you indirectly cause something like that.

The original version of this game, however, is on the Genesis. For a while I was curious if it was any better, and really it only bumps up from like a 1 to a 2 or 3. It's still awful, and would you believe the music is just as bad? It's not ear piercingly loud or anything like the Game Gear version, but it's really flaccid and sad and often just sounds like you gave a four year old a Casio keyboard and left them with it for 20 minutes. The sound effects are basically the same as well, and early on you'll hardly be able to discern them from the music. Each time he lands for example, a tone of random pitch is played, something that sounds like a sad trumpet. Every, single, time. Have fun with that.

The quizzical level design is also of note. Take a look at either of the levels in the mines, or the log riding levels, and you'll see what I mean. But even in its more subdued moments, it's weird and mazelike and full of death pits. It's a weird feeling to have what feels like screen crunch on a game designed for a fucking CRT, no? What's up with that? Is it just another product of putting large sprites as top priority and then forgetting to make anything else good, like Sword of Sodan? Are you really doing anything right at all if your game can be compared to that?

So no, the Genesis version is not good either. I would change the rating by a point or two to accomodate but it seems on here it's actually the less popular version now lmfao. Really absurd game. I hope Taz runs for president in 2024

One of the most joyful games I haver ever played in years, so in love of being a game and having you play it.

With a background in pre revolutionary France, you play a game of spies and court intrigue cheating all the way through a conspiracy in card games. Learning each new trick is a wonderful experience that makes you feel like a true arnaqueur of the aristocracy, grinning all the way to the card saloon of the high nobilty while you take both their livres and secrets.

But not only that, the game is also beautifully drawn, reminescent of drawings and sketches of the period with vibrant colors and quite articulate animations. But the music steals the show for me, with a live orchestra performing classical pieces and folkloric songs of the different people that inhabited France during the tumultous time.

All in all, an incredible experience that just goes to show how amazing gaming can be as a medium to tell a story.

a sad example of a sequel completely treading water and failing to expand its series concept a single iota. in many ways you could take my ape escape review and just plop it here without anything changed. many of the positives of the original game stemmed from its novelty in the space of 3D platformers and its excellent psx engine that showcased the hardware at its peak. its sequel seems infinitely lazier and less ambitious in comparison, cribbing extensively from the original with little variation and a lot of repetition. not bad, but terribly disappointing.

-all the original gadgets reappear, but the new ones are rather slight lock-and-key affairs that only serve to increase the amount of time you spend menuing to swap them in. the water cannon, bananarang, and magnet each have their own obstacles that can only be solved using them, and in no cases do the developers attempt to expand upon their usage or make legitimate puzzles involving them. lots of "oh the monkey is in a cage labeled with a banana, time to throw the bananarang" and "look a fire pit, time to use the water cannon" etc.

-dunno if I had rose-tinted glasses in the first game or not but good god the controls are stiff and unresponsive here. hikaru has no smooth speed-up and instead jerks into motion at the slightest touch of the analog stick. his first jump has range but is low, and his second jump is high but awkwardly kills all momentum. the sky flyer also feels less fluid than the original, or maybe I'm just misremembering. regardless, precision platforming felt more strenuous this time around, and the devs seem to have taken notice given that they gutted much of the legitimately difficult trials from the original

-level themes are inconsistent and slapdash compared to the mostly focused time-periods schtick of the original. no context for why I'm anywhere doing anything other than just catching more monkeys! the more elaborate interlocking levels of the original are also dumbed down here to mainly linear courses or maybe a loop here or there. might be giving the original too much credit but again I feel like it also did a better job giving monkeys specific challenges rather than just strewing them across the world haphazardly.

-soichi terada is absent this time around and thus the crystalline breakbeat and house of the original is pushed aside in favor of generic and schmaltzy midi abominations that left me with no other choice than to blare podcasts on top of it. going from a game that so perfectly nailed its quirky atmosphere with a polygonal shonen running around catching heavily-armed monkeys with a net all soundtracked by lite-rave blasts and comedown room leads... to this boring happy-go-lucky generic mascot platformer aesthetic that sucks the life out of the experience. dreadful

-ape escape itself is such a flawed design concept that the lack of changes are really striking. I said in the prior review that the right stick is meant for the camera; more specifically trying to triangulate angles between 1) your movement and position on the left stick 2) the angle of attack or object use on the right stick 3) the erratic movement of the auto-cam is actually less accurate than just having the camera on the right stick in the first place. one game (two really with ape escape 2001) should have been enough to prove this, but ape escape 2 blunders along with all of the same issues, inaccuracies, and frustrations of the original. of all the gadgets, the net is now somehow even more annoying because new cinematic swing animations that play randomly (or maybe when the game thinks you have a guaranteed successful catch?) have such severe windup that the monkey can actually simply walk out of your range during it, leading to an embarassing whiff that begs the question of why such an animation even exists.

the game's biggest positive is that at the same time of all of this it is still ape escape and is still a totally competent 3D platformer that I legitimately enjoyed in a brain-dead podcast game way during the middle section. by that point I already knew that the game was a clunker (after playing the first areas and being completely turned off the game for months) and had not quite reached the endgame (which felt utterly perfunctory and totally devoid of any iteration in challenge over the prior levels). bosses are fine too: functionally on-par with contemporaries with easy-to-parse attack patterns. the vehicle areas are simplistic but nice diversions, and thankfully they aren't over-deployed to the point of becoming stale.

ape escape thrives on its cheeky experimental streak, and unfortunately ape escape 2 lacks that charismatic edge to keep the player engaged. I wasn't expecting to see a series with a concept so fresh and flippant trot out the hits so soon in its chronology. somehow not a surprise sony withheld this one from the states for an entire year only to let ubisoft publish it in their stead.

This is...awful. I'm not sure if it's just a shitty porting job or what, but this is nigh unplayable. You have NO invincibility frames, and even the most basic enemies will reduce you to worm food in less than a second. Not helping is the feeling that your hitbox is a bit larger than you yourself. Some of the enemies take way too many hits as well, worst of all being these spiders that the game loves to throw at you around the middle of its runtime.

Here's a trick you can do. You can actually clip through walls to take shortcuts (or fall and die usually), you wanna know how? Literally just hold left and right at the same time. How do you not catch that? That's game breaking! And also, why was some of the level design so obtuse that I found myself using it just to make progress??

The bosses are unbearable, they all are way bigger than you and there's never a safe spot away from them, meaning they'll always chew through your lives and you get no say in it at all. I watched the Amiga version and this doesn't seem to be entirely the case there, so maybe it's another sign of a shitty port? I don't know, man. I think even otherwise it's just kind of a shitty game for starters. I heard the playtesters were often smoking weed in another room according to an interview, and whether or not it's bullshit I really think it checks out. Moral here, do not bother with this one, try Super Turrican instead. Can't speak on Turrican II or Mega Turrican yet, maybe some day though.

part of the reason I love old-school sega games is because I just love the way their games feel. games designed by sega straddle the line between nuanced, logical physics and exaggerated, arcade-y physics with aplomb. the sega rally series captures this perfectly, where the terrain material and topography are intimately factored into the performance of your car while at the same time you can perfectly drift around corners and fly over hills with a bit of squash-and-stretch going on. the tightrope here is between making the player feel like they're in total control of the car (with the consequences that result) while simultaneously hand-waving the internal mechanisms that limit player expression. the early monkey ball games are the same way: the level design is punishing yet it's addicting because any strategy you devise can probably work thanks to how controllable the ball is. it's why I've stuck with this series so long: from barely making it past beginner as a young child, to learning the extra levels as a high schooler, to finally conquering master and master extra in both games as I whittled away time during a global lockdown.

that being said, I didn't want to go into this game with unrealistic hopes. I knew the original engine was not being used here, so I figured it probably would be a bit stiffer and maybe a little hand-holdy. after all, this remake is partially meant to introduce new players and give them leverage to actually succeed in comparison to the original games, where over half of the levels were tucked behind some serious execution barriers. when I popped it in for the first time this mostly held true: I ran smb1 beginner (newly christened as "casual") without much issue. it wasn't until I touched smb1 expert immediately after...

167 deaths. 167 deaths without including expert extra no less, which I accidentally voided myself out of thanks to misreading the helper option menu that pops up automatically (protip to UI designers: don't make both your selected and unselected options bright colors!!!). these levels are no cakewalk, let's be clear, but I know these levels by the back of my hand. I've 1cc'd expert + expert extra in the original many many times, and even now out of practice I can manage 10 - 15 deaths. it just shocked me that this game felt so different, and so much less precise. in a lot of ways it felt like the original levels popped into Unity with a basic sphere physics plugin, and the results were not pretty. my roommates (also long-time monkey ball fans) also immediately wrote off the game after playing it. even though we had been so hype about finally getting an HD monkey ball - a monkey ball game that wasn't garbage and didn't require us to pull out our CRT - all of our energy immediately dissapated once we got our hands on the game.

so what exactly is the issue here? basically everyone agrees that the physics in this game are noticably different from that of the original, but I want to delve into why. after playing this game for quite a bit (all of story mode, up through master mode in smb1, all the deluxe levels, and poking around into other stuff here and there) I think I've narrowed it down to frictional differences between the two games. for those of you who haven't taken high school physics in some time, let me present the equation f = μN, where f is the frictional force applied parallel to surface we are moving upon (usually horizontally), μ is the coefficient of friction, and N is the normal force applied perpendicular to the surface (hence the name "normal"). before your eyes glaze over, let me connect these to some intangible game-feel statements:

coefficient of friction: this refers to how difficult it is to move over a material; for example, it accounts for why it's more difficult to slide your coffee table when it's on a shaggy carpet versus a finished wood floor. as it relates to the how it feels in this game, I'll borrow a quote from my roommate when he was playing the game: "it feels like every single floor is made out of glass"

normal force: this refers to how hard the object is pushing down on the surface, which in this case mainly refers to the gravitational force the object exerts. this scales with the mass, so we can think of it as how much the object weighs; a cardboard box is a lot easier to move than a full wardrobe. this affects the game-feel, as my girlfriend eloquently put: "it's like there's no monkey at all, and you're just rolling around a hollow ball"

so tldr: there's a severe lack of friction in this game in comparison to the original. in the original game, the ball was weighty, and the friction on the goal posts or ledges allows you to grip them easily (and a bit unrealistically for that matter). these things are boons to the player that go a long way towards making impossible looking courses just barely doable with practice. here the stages refuse to budge when you try to force them to, and you end up without a lot of the gravity-defying tricks you could initially pull off. I'll give some examples of situations that pop up that break under the new physics:

stopping the ball: this took a lot of adjustment for me, and while it's just a matter of relearning muscle memory it very noticeably makes some stages harder. in the original game you could stop pretty much on a dime (unless you were rolling to the point of sparks flying), whereas here the ball will sliiiiiiiide all over the place unless you very deliberately deccelerate. this is more of a general issue but a good example of where this becomes frustrating is Twin Cross, where you're expected to roll across a series of 1x1 tiles in diagonal lines. you need to keep a certain level of speed up to avoid falling off when crossing the corners of two tiles, but then also must deccelerate at the right moment to keep your ball from flying off at the end of a line (which itself is just a 1x1 tile floating in space). Edge Master also becomes more annoying than its prior appearances thanks to this issue, as staying within the bounds of the upward face of the first rotation becomes very precise given how much speed you gain when the stage rotates.

narrow lines: approach a ledge in this game and you'll notice that the bottom of your ball will just be barely close to the ledge when your character starts trembling and attempting to balance themself. compare that to the original, where the characters won't start said animation until their feet are literally touching the ledge, far closer to the center of mass for the ball. you basically have a lot less wiggle room on the edge, and it can become very apparent in certain levels that depend on this. kudos to the dev team for adjust Catwalk to accommodate, but on the flipside look at Invasion. I'd say this level was middle of the road in terms of its original difficulty, but here it's fucking brutal towards the end, where you're expected to navigate in a curve on a ledge around staggered bumpers. comments I've read on early gameplay capture on youtube were quick to point to this stage as one of the biggest difficulty bumps for a remade stage.

slopes: friction is the reason why we don't instantly slide down slopes in real life, hence why we use snowboards and skis instead of just standing on mountains waiting to gain speed. however, in monkey ball the goal is usually not to slide down slopes unless you're explicitly supposed to, and many levels depend on you being able to balance yourself on slopes either while waiting for a cycle or when speeding through before you have a chance to fall off. Drum and Twister back-to-back in smb1's ice world were originally breather stages, where you simply had to keep yourself balanced in brief intervals before reaching the goal. here they became much more precise than I feel was intended, as even slightly moving from the narrow top of the curve on either of these levels will send you careening to your death with no recourse. from smb2 I can absolutely not forget to mention Warp... oh my god Warp. this level was already surprisingly difficult in smb2, given that the flatter part of the curves here are covered with bumpers and maintaing yourself on a slope is already a trickier technique to learn (I see a lot of more casual players get stuck on Floor Bent from smb1 for this reason). here it's nigh impossible to do thanks to how little grip you have. Cross Floors is another smb2 example that requires a lot of practice in the original and here feels terrible to attempt.

centripedal force: some of you may have seen charity donation recepticles shaped like curved funnels (I've seen them in american malls at least), where you can put a coin into a slot and it will spiral around the funnel down and down until falling through a hole at the bottom, much like water spinning in a drain. there are multiple areas in the original monkey ball games that utilize this phenomenon to great effect, and it relies on the friction of the slope or wall that the ball is on to keep it from dropping out. however, when I first played Spiral Hard in this game, I was very surprised to find that I could not simply drop in as I was accustomed to, as even with a decent amount of speed the ball does not grab onto the slope and instead falls off. it took me several tries to successfully drop in, where I had to come in with an exceptional amount of speed, heavily tilt against the slope to avoid falling off, try to balance out before I lost the speed I needed to stay in, and then continue on my way. this level is already difficult enough as is, with a path that narrows the further it spirals down and a goal that is difficult to aim for, so I don't see why dropping in needs to also require a lot of set up when it didn't originally. the end of Stamina Master is also much more difficult than before thanks to this, as the spiral towards the end becomes nearly vertical, and I would often drop out of it completely before I reached the goal. the pipe stages also seem to struggle with keeping you moving, such as the smb1 expert extra stage Curl Pipe, where the second hill virtually always stopped me dead in my tracks (though I've had this happen occasionally in the original as well).

this would be a good time for me to also mention how the camera has changed significantly from the original games. the camera used to rather aggressively stick to the ball's back, whereas here the camera will follow your stick without really staying glued to a particular orientation on the ball. to solve this there is now camera control on the right-stick... this sort of defeats the purpose of the original one-giant-banana-joystick control scheme, but I'm sure plenty of players will feel more comfortable with it there. the big issue here comes when trying to line up straight lines: in the original game it was very doable to turn in place with the camera lining up directly with the center of the monkey's back. here it's already hard enough to turn in place given that you slide around with so little provocation, and now you must center the camera manually using... non-analog controls? yes, the right stick does not seem to have a real gradient of turning from my time playing with it, giving it little more functionality than d-pad camera controls. you can at least adjust camera sensitivity, but I feel like you're forced to sometimes go in and change it per stage, ie high sensitivity for when you need to turn quickly or steadily on fast stages, and low sensitivity when you line up precise shots. the latter was a necessity on Exam-C (a particularly infamous stage) and the aforementioned Twin Cross, as well as Checker, and it made all three of these stages much more tedious than I would've liked. sometimes the camera just breaks entirely, most notably on Centrifugal from smb2, where the speed of rotation in the giant wheel of death causes the camera to get stuck outside the level geometry, or flip in front of you to mess up the angle you're tilting the stage in.

I wanted to include this diatribe about the physics in here just to have some sort of document with the issues I've noticed with this game, and as to provide a detailed summary of why and where the physics are different without just saying they are. players who know the levels above might have noticed that they're virtually all pulled from expert and master: this is because the beginner and advanced difficulties (casual and normal) are totally playable regardless of the changes. that is not to say they aren't still difficult (I still have not beaten Polar Large in this game and, much to my consternation, can not even figure out a good route through it for some reason) but if you're coming in just to fuck around a bit, play through part of story mode, enjoy the cameos, and play minigames with friends, you're not going to notice the different game-feel to the extent of it being overbearing. on the flipside, I do feel justified in presenting my opinions on this in pedantic detail because beginner and advanced only make up 108 stages out of the 258 total stages between the non-DX games, which is to say that for over half of the game you will likely notice what I mentioned above unless you have never played the originals.

regardless of everything listed above, I've actually rated this one a bit higher than super monkey ball deluxe, a collection that still has the original physics intact. my rationale: banana mania is an amazing package overall. what honestly frustrates me more than anything about this game is that it perfectly captures the features and content I'd want in a remake of these games without the tight gameplay I originally adored in the originals. whereas deluxe (on ps2 mind you) was a poorly performing mess with overly-long course structure and a lack of improvements over smb2, this game is packed to the brim with extra modes, great cameo characters, and accesibility features. not everything really hits, but I appreciate how much effort and material there is here with so little development time.

the main game specifically deliminates between the first two games for its courses, unlike deluxe where stages from both games were interleaved. each course is 1:1 with their original set of stages, with extra stages now being unlocked if all the regular stages were completed without the helper functions active. master mode for smb1 is now accessible just by completing expert without the 1cc requirement or even extra stages being finished. there are also marathon modes for each, which while not as wild as the ultimate course from deluxe, still are great additions. stages in both have been rebalanced, with the original layouts being included in a special purchaseable game mode. overall the rebalances were really well done: probably the most notable for me was Arthopod, a stage from smb2 that was complete bullshit originally and has now been made less annoying to deal with by far by removing gaps. virtually all of smb1 master was rebalanced as well, with Stamina Master getting a much-needed nerf to its infamous middle 1x1 moving tile balancing section (which balances out the more difficult first and last sections a bit). the other master changes honestly make some of the stages like Dodge Master and Dance Master trivial, but I don't really mind considering that the requirements for obtaining master are less restrictive now. other changes are more subtle, such as adding curved inlets to the titular launchers in Launchers (which honestly don't help very much) or an extra 30 seconds for the timer in Exam-C (which helps an insane amount).

there's a story mode identical to that of smb2, with truncated cutscenes in mime retelling the lovably bizarre plot of the original. personally I don't mind this change, as the story isn't really that important or complicated. I'm a little puzzled at why they didn't use the expanded worlds of deluxe's story mode, but it's not a big difference either way. as I mentioned prior stages that were changed have their original versions present in a standalone mode, and all of the deluxe-exclusive levels have a mode as well. playing through them all back to back, I have to say I still like them for the most part, as there's a lot of great ideas present (maybe one too many maze stages tho). there are also a few modes that remix the levels. golden banana mode is probably the best of these, where you need to collect every banana in a stage in order to clear it. this actually changes how the stages need to be approached quite a bit. the opposite of this is dark banana mode, where any banana touched instantly causes a game over. while the idea is good in concept, they're designed for a level of precision I just don't think exists in this game. finally there's reverse mode, where certain levels start you at the goal and make you work your way back to the starting point. the best level of these is Free Throw, where they make you throw yourself backwards onto the starting platform in a cool twist. the others mainly just require you to tread the same path as whatever the hardest goal is, so they come across as rather redundant.

minigames are also back in full force, with all of the features from deluxe retained to my knowledge. the big thing that turned me off here was the lack of alternating multiplayer, which even in a patch could be such a trivial addition. I bought this on ps4, where I don't really have extra controllers to work with, and it's frustrating that my roommates and I can't play monkey target or billiards by passing the controller around. overall the minigames seem to be pretty much as I remember them from the old games, with all the customization you could want to boot. I can't really pretend something like monkey race isn't scuffed as fuck, but they were in the originals as well so it's pretty faithful. all that I played other than monkey target look very solid... monkey target is honestly a "Made in Dreams"-ass game here, but it's so annoying in its original form that I'll let it slide here. most of the other games here I can just experience via yakuza or really don't care that much about, beyond perhaps trying to go for completion later down the line.

I also wanted to briefly mention the art design for both the menus and the levels, which are absolutely phenomenal. beyond some UI nitpicks I mentioned earlier I think the interface is very clear and clean, and feels like an accurate translation from the older games to a modern style. the world designs are really gorgeous, and blew me away with their accuracy. I really would not have thought a quickie project for RGG would capture the style and detail of the original worlds so well in HD, but they absolutely nailed it here. the banana blitz-era monkey designs I'm not crazy about but they do the job fine, and the cutesy redesigns of kiryu and beat are so fun; I still can't believe they're in the game!! the music has all been remixed as well, though I personally think they're pretty middling overall. the original soundtracks are legendary so I definitely didn't expect them to live up here, but they really veer into tacky EDM territory more often than I would like.

finally, I wanted to bring up the accessibility options, which are much-needed additions for newer fans looking to try the series out. you can use helper functions in each level to double the timer as well as open up a very useful slow motion mode for the cost of receiving no points upon clearing the level and disabling the extra stages for the course. I messed around with these a bit and I think they do a good job of covering the bases for someone learning a given stage. if stage is too taxing, you can also pay 2000 banana coins to mark it as cleared. which is a hefty toll but honestly worth it when poking around in the special modes to skip annoying levels that would take a lot of practice. finally, the jump from banana blitz has been added in as a purchaseable item, and surprisingly it doesn't void trophies/extra stuff like the helper functions (though it can't be used in ranking mode). when watching trailers I thought I wouldn't touch this at all but I decided to try it out when struggling on Warp and wow did it really save my ass. because the jump wasn't present in the original games, it opens up a lot of ways to break previously challenging level design, and honestly that became the most fun part of the game for me at points. skipping all of the tiring maze levels from smb2 feels so great, and I even managed to pull off a strat equivalent to the speedrun route for Stamina Master by jumping at the peak of the first ramp. it honestly made the final worlds of story mode a lot more enjoyable given how many frustrating and gimmicky levels are contained within it (they were bad in the original too, not just this game). when I eventually get around to smb2 master and master extra, I'm sure I'll have fun finding ways to break levels that originally took me dozens of lives to beat.

I think I've exhaustively covered every aspect of this game that I've played so far... and now that I've finished this giant wall of text I can finally move onto some other games. I don't think I've wasted my time with this game at all, and I'm glad this package exists, but man does it really not scratch that itch that the original games do. perhaps an engine on par with the original simply isn't capable of happening without the original source code available... but at the end of the day I'll still have the original games to return to when I really want to experience monkey ball as it originally felt.

If I had to be objective about Undertale, it's a 4/5 or so, maybe a tad lower. The quality-of-life improvements Deltarune brought to the table have made Undertale feel pretty scrappy by comparison - Undertale is considerably uglier than Deltarune, especially in the sprite work department, because my God some of these sprites look amateurish and cobbled-together (Undyne, wtf did they do to you?). UT's visuals exist somewhere in the realm of 'passable' and 'kinda fugly', and this combined with the lack of a run button somewhat dulls the overall pacing of Undertale's gameplay loop.

I also have a problem with the Genocide Route on a mechanical level. I'm aware, yes, that it's supposed to feel like a grindey slog. I'm aware that, yes, that's the point, you're literally scouring every nook and cranny for your next murder victim, the repetition is supposed to hammer in how needlessly cruel this is. But just because something is intentionally dull does not magically make it less dull in the slightest. The game's two best battles, most interesting themes, and darkest moments are hidden inside the Genocide Route, but the experience of actually getting to them is unsatisfying and hollow, your one-man army slaughter of countless, terrified innocents looking more like some stupid kid trudging around or glitching in place to hopefully spawn the last Pyrope or the last Froggit they didn't kill. And I think this hurts the game more than it realizes - the blandness of the Genocide Route undermines the supposed horror and merciless grandiosity of what you're doing to these people. Eventually, they stop feeling like victims and more like bullet points on a list worth crossing off. And, once more, even if that's the point, it doesn't do the game any favors due to an eventual lack of emotional investment. Self-awareness does not absolve you of anything - even if Genocide knows it's boring, that doesn't change the fact that a solid third of the game is uninteresting.

That said? Undertale is a masterpiece. Objectivity is a fantasy, after all, you can never be truly 'objective' about anything. What matters is what speaks to you and what works for you, and honestly, even Undertale's 'lesser' moments click for me at parts - Genocide has the best boss battle of the 2010's (Sans) and even the clunky visuals have a certain rugged charm about them, a rugged charm aided by strong character designs and some occasionally genuinely-impressive backgrounds (love The Core, Hotland, and Waterfall).

Undertale was a smash hit because Undertale draws you in and it keeps you drawn in for the entire duration of its runtime. Everything about it is familiar yet unique, making you feel a warm kind of nostalgia while simultaneously making you feel like you're playing something truly unusual. The characters are fun and quirky, but there's a lot of subtext and depth going on under the hood of some of the game's best characters, like Sans' nihilism or Flowey's particularly depressing backstory. Flowey is an interesting villain - his devil-may-care insanity is a dark portrait of the player's own attitude towards the game, and a lot of Undertale is really about exploring whether you'll stay above the temptations of cruelty and godhood that save-scumming presents you, or if you'll fall into the same abyss that Flowey did and start toying with the residents just to see what happens. It's great! It's meta, it's haunting, it's interesting, and it's a very neat reflection on you, the player. You are an active, dynamic element in this story, and that's what works about Undertale's theming.

The blend of bullet-hell theatrics and turn-based combat also works shockingly well (the game gets tough but it is never unfair), the amount of lore tucked away inside the game's dark interior makes you want to dive in and explore more of it (Gaster), and the music, man. The music. Toby Fox is a game-dev genius, yes, but he's a musical genius first and foremost, and Fox's exceptional use of reoccurring motifs, retro soundfonts, and strong, immediately-memorable melodies & hooks makes you nostalgic for UT's OST before the game's even over. Hopes and Dreams combining a lot of the game's former motifs into this grand spectacle of pre-established melody and rhythm is the perfect backdrop to your larger-than-life battle with Asriel at the very end.

Undertale is not a perfect game, but it was the perfect game to a lot of people. And I have to admit, I fell under Toby Fox's spell hard. This game bleeds emotions and feelings out of you that a lot of games just don't, and anyone that didn't have a fun time with this is, frankly, not a very fun person to begin with. This game didn't become a cultural phenomenon on the backs of memes and furries and MatPat exclusively (although it certainly helped). Undertale is a phenomenon because, at the end of the day, it's not actually a game about violence or meta-commentary or good vs. evil. These are all just embellishments to the true overarching theme of the game:

Empathy.

And the fact that so many people wound up falling in love with this game's dorky cast of characters is a heartwarming reminder that, even in a world as dark as ours, there will always be empathy & sincerity somewhere. You just have to look around and find it. And maybe you'll find it in a funny skeleton that loves his brother and telling bad jokes.

Also, Asgore shattering the 'MERCY' button is the dopest fucking shit.

Finally got to the last remaining Ape Escape game I had left in the series after finishing the original and 3 earlier this year. It's still Ape Escape, so it's a very pleasant experience, though I can't help but feel... sufficiently whelmed, to say the least.

Let's start with the positives. The leaps in graphical fidelity are very noticeable here; I was having a bit of trouble adjusting to how blocky Ape Escape 1 looked at times (with textures that seemed to vibrate), and in general the graphics have held up much better, with much smoother character models and surfaces as well. The increase to 60 FPS helps a ton too with general movement and game feel, and the controls feel quite a bit more responsive as well; for example, precision jumping feels a lot easier to achieve, and the Sky Flyer activation felt a lot more consistent in Ape Escape 2 as compared to the original (or at least it felt that way to me, rotating the right stick to activate the Sky Flyer did not feel as excruciating this time around). Note that most of this isn't so much a knock at the original Ape Escape as it is pointing out just how giant of a difference the game felt and looked with three years inbetween. You've also got more movement and attack options in general, such as a ground pound and a dive. Following from this, catching the monkeys and engaging in combat in general feels much less clunky; while I kept running into instances where the monkeys' hitboxes kept outranging my net in the original, I can't recall any egregious instances of this happening in 2. You've got both the frames and the movement/attack options to outrange most of the monkeys and deal with them accordingly (color coded for your convenience), and while it's not perfect because some of the monkeys have odd attacks (the love gun's entire beam lingers for some reason and the missiles fired by green monkeys will often catch you off guard with how suddenly they are fired at times), you can generally outsmart them when you play your cards right (i.e. using your hoop to knock down blue monkeys and sneaking up on unsuspecting white pants monkeys) instead of having to hope for the best with an all-in shakedown. It's nice having a larger variety of gadgets that just feel cleaner to use; the Water Net has smoother diving/surfacing controls, the Slingback Shooter has more intuitive aiming with instant camera snap (and smoother reticle scrolling), and the Sky Flyer as mentioned before isn't as frame tight and is generally easier to work with. I didn't even have any issues using the vehicles this time around (which were a general source of frustration for me in both of the other games); I was able to move around the Pipobot like a normal human being (one joystick moves, the other joystick attacks), the snowmobile while uninteresting controls pretty smoothly, and even the tank and boat were solid enough experiences once I took my time to carefully plot out my path.

Now, I'll nitpick a little bit more here because at this point, my expectations for the Ape Escape series have really risen after how much fun I've had with the games in general. As with most 3D platformers, the first point of contention is usually the camera. It's already much smoother in Ape Escape 2 as compared to the original (at least I didn't have to fight off screen UFOs this time around), but it'll still have the occasional issue where trying to chase monkeys in tight spaces while walking towards the camera will cause the angles to uncomfortably shift up and down, disorienting you while you hunt down monkeys in these nooks and crannies. This gets further complicated because the monkeys will sometimes randomly dodge or jump out of the way of the net (and the wind-up animation of the net side swing does not help here either). Fortunately, you can get away most of the time by just using L1 to snap the camera's direction towards the same direction as Jimmy's sight, but this isn't always perfect and sometimes the camera will fail to completely adjust to the right perspective. This is definitely a more prevalent issue during certain sections where you need to walk across tightropes; there's no "snap" in Ape Escape 2 where your character will suddenly slow down and carefully creep as soon as you approach the zone of danger on the tightrope where you could fall off. So, if you don't have that camera lined up well for a straight shot across the tightrope, you may have a bad time and fall off suddenly unless you're really good at adjusting your angle of movement on the fly. This fortunately isn't a huge deal most of the time, but those instances where this will occur will leave a mark on you.

I'll nitpick the gadgets as well (and just after I finished praising them for being functional too!). Certain gadgets get used more than others, as is just par for the course because you ultimately will rely a lot upon the net for catching monkeys, the beam saber for dealing damage/destroying objects, and the Sky Flyer for more precise jumps and additional height. So... why not just have those binded to hotkeys (present from the start, for the beam saber and Time Net and added on for the Sky Flyer once that's obtained)? This wouldn't be so much of an issue if quick select (a convenience feature present in the Japanese version, where you can just mash a single symbol button to quick scroll and select a new gadget from your list of already obtained gadgets) was present, but is seemingly missing from PAL and USA versions, so you have to press Start, scroll to the Gadgets menu, and swap them out every time you need to use the magnet/water cannon/banana-rang for its one instance before swapping to other gadgets. Thankfully Ape Escape 3 brings back the sorely missed quick select feature, but I can't help but feel that there's missed potential in expanding features for gadgets... for example, they could have made the magnets attract enemy missiles and then when released, fire them back, or use the water cannons to short circuit certain robots or stuff laser attacks. It's unfortunately a bit of an issue with the series in general with this "lock & key" model and adding little wrinkles to the gadgets here and there would have gone a long way in expanding how one can approach the levels and monkeys.

This is just my opinion here, but I also feel that Ape Escape is a little bland in terms of atmosphere compared to its predecessors. The original Ape Escape has a banging soundtrack that I've put on for work/study in the background many times by now... I can't really name any tunes that stood out to me in Ape Escape 2's OST however, even though the soundtrack felt serviceable as is. The story (and in a sense, the level aesthetic) also doesn't feel as absurdly funny as the other two games. In the original, you've got this mastermind monkey who's gained access to time travel to manipulate history as he sees fit, and he and his monkey gang have laid their mark upon stretches of civilization and primordial landscapes to take over society as we know it. Similarly, Ape Escape 3's premise is my favorite dumb premise of all time; the monkeys have created their own version of Hollywood, with the goal of creating reproductions that are so absurdly dogshit, that they will brainwash television watching humans with how dogshit their productions are. Now compare these two to Ape Escape 2's premise, where in a nutshell, Spectre's able to raise up another army because Jimmy is incompetent and... they spread their monkey army across various landmarks/countries and are big chillin. Yeah, that's about it, really.

And finally, to cap off how I feel about the somewhat less engaging atmosphere, the levels don't really have that same absurdist design to the same extent of the other two games, or at least it doesn't feel different enough from the original. Ape Escape 1's got volcanos, the ice age, stone ruins versus imperial temples and dojos, the inside of a primordial beast, the horrors of modern office buildings and skyscrapers... you name it, they've got it. Ape Escape 2 more or less follows this same exact trend and adds a desert level too I guess. That's not to say that it's bad level design, it just doesn't feel distinctly different enough from the original to leave much of a mark on me. Compare this again with how Ape Escape 3 took a different spin on this by throwing dumb monkey reproductions and movie sets into all these different environments, and you'll see what I mean. While I'm nitpicking the levels, I'll also take this time to bring up parts of the last 2 levels as a minor complaint; there are at least two sections where all you do is use your magnet gadget to latch onto magnetic moving platforms, and wait until the platform carries you over to the next platform where you can latch onto another platform, and so on so forth. This is probably the least engaging section that I experienced in the game in general, and could have been removed altogether or replaced with anything else and have been a significant improvement, though even with these I fortunately found the last two levels to be much less of a slog than Ape Escape's final level, as ambitious as that was. To add on to another complaint by others, some of the boss battles feel a bit too simple and by the books as compared to Ape Escape 3's very over the top and batshit crazy fights with tons of fun to abuse super powers/forms. Oh, and spending a ton of time just vending random items from the gacha machine felt kinda lame and somewhat time consuming as compared to the little market in Ape Escape 3. At least the monkey fables were funny!

Despite all my pointed criticisms though, I understand that at the end of the day, Ape Escape 2 is still a fairly solid game when I think of the overall picture; it made significant improvements to the original formula thanks to better performance and more polished mechanics, and despite lacking in notable moments and aesthetic when I compare it to the other two games, it's nevertheless a very cozy 3D platformer to sit and play through; it's a great "turn your brain off" comfort food kind of game, and I wouldn't have it any other way. It speaks volumes that I had to push through to finish parts of the original at times (my monkey brain just couldn't get used to some of the jank I suppose) but I was able to finish Ape Escape 2 no frills in a few sittings over the course of four days. Does it match the peaks of Ape Escape 3? No, and you should still absolutely play that over this because Ape Escape 3 is one of the most regarded games of our time. But Ape Escape 2 will still give you that fuzzy little feeling in your heart when you just want something to mess around with in your favorite dumb video game series for a week. Oh, and if you play the NTSC version, Veronica Taylor (Ash's voice actor) voices Jimmy while Rachael Lillis (Misty's voice actor) voices Natalie, so you get to pretend that you're playing a better Pokemon game, quite literally catching em all!

I'll say it again... Sony, please bring back Ape Escape. I've never been happier as a gamer with your recent PC releases and PS5 titles, so what's one risk taken to bring back a beloved fan-favorite? It took me a while to get my feet wet, and now that I've taken the plunge, consider me a lifelong fan of the series. I'm gonna miss these wild antics... but if Klonoa can make a comeback, then maybe there's a chance for these monkes.

I don't have too much to say about this one. Simply put: Pocky & Rocky is a fantastic overhead shoot-em-up featuring really fun and endearing character designs, excellent sprite work, and levels that are just a blast to play. Gameplay remains pretty simple from start to finish, but Pocky & Rocky is proof that you don't need to hitch on a ton of crazy gimmicks for the sake of uniqueness.

Admittedly, I have a hard time telling where this game ends and its sequel begins, a consequence of me playing these back-to-back, though I do know that Pocky & Rocky 2 is the more beloved and perhaps best remembered entry in the series. That's not to say you should sleep on the first, however, especially if you're a shoot-em-up fan.

Just a shame the franchise didn't stick around for very long, with twenty years separating 2001's Pocky & Rocky With Becky and the recently released Reshrined. I love these little bastards and I'm glad they're back.

Going from playing Banana Mania, to playing Super Monkey Ball 2, to finally playing this game, has been a strange experience; each later game individually good and enjoyable on their own merits, only for their flaws to become more apparent when compared with what came before.

The issues with Banana Mania's physics have already been excellently laid out by Pangburn. They're the exact sort of things that I didn't really notice at the time, but that become very clear the moment you play the earlier games with the original physics engine; Banana Mania is weirdly frictionless in a way that leads to a lot of issues, and whilst as someone relatively new to the series I wrote off me getting stuck on some levels for as long as half an hour as me just being inexperienced and playing badly, the moment I returned to these older games it became so clear that it actually wasn't really my fault after all but rather that the newer physics engine sets you up to fail by just not being suited to some of these challenges.

Super Monkey Ball 2's physics engine is night-and-day better than Banana Mania's, and I enjoyed the game a lot, but again the moment you compare it to the first Super Monkey Ball game issues start to rear their head. SMB2 leans hard into gimmick levels in an attempt to make itself stand out, and whilst some of the gimmick levels rule a lot of them either lack the replay value (especially ones where the entire challenge is to figure out a specific timing or route) or are just explicitly not fun to try and master in the way that the more physics-focused levels are; Launchers is such a heinous example that I couldn't bring myself to try and complete that game's harder arcade modes. Some of these gimmick levels also push at what you're really capable of in-game with the game's fixed camera, which I assume is a part of why Banana Mania would go on to have camera control; I think both these outcomes are not really ideal.

And then you come to Super Monkey Ball and in contrast it's just this perfect little package. Every level has a fun little idea or challenge to it, the game is so focused on the physics and execution that replaying earlier levels is a joy as you see how far you've come, whilst learning the later levels is this constant process of having things click into place in your head. The gameplay loop is also just effortlessly effective; you play through an arcade mode level selection only to get stuck on a specific level and have your run end, so you go work over that stumbling block in practice mode learning its intricacies so that next time you'll get a little bit further in arcade mode, every time getting a bit more practice on the earlier levels you find harder too and seeing your performance constantly grow. Expert mode is kind of nonsense, but just as you start to hit your limit the game starts slowly feeding you more continues as if to say you can do this is you just stick with it.

I also love the aesthetics of this one. The giant bomb at the top of the screen would probably be considered 'objectively' bad, it takes up a lot of screen real estate and just obscures your vision, but damn if it doesn't just ooze personality.

Was meant to be attending a Christmas party last night, but our gathering caught the attention of omicron’s evil eye and the whole joint got cancelled. One of my friends who was visiting from far away had already bought his train ticket, so we decided to hang out regardless and went to the local barcade. Most of the machines were broken and the guy behind the bar watching RWBY on his iPad didn’t give a shit if Crazy Taxi was swallowing £1s, so most of our time was spent valiantly going up against this shit because the buttons weren’t crusted in dry beer.

Everything (except the art) in Simpsons Arcade kinda sucks - it’s a one-button beat em up with no context abilities, plenty of überjank hitboxes and the bosses do whatever the opposite of telegraphing attacks is, but I had a nice time because I was playing it with my pal and he was hitting me with a constant stream of Simpsons trivia. Did you know the final episode of The Simpsons was gonna reveal that Marge was an alien?! Wow!

Yep, that was definitely the first KOF game.
It seems almost any early fighting game franchise starts with a rather rough first entry, and KOF is no exception. That being said, I don't think that KOF '94 is a bad game compared to many other first attempts in this genre.
KOF '94 is very basic with it's gameplay. The only notable things here being you can sidestep (light punch + light kick) which is mainly helpful for dodging projectiles, and you can also charge your super meter. Gaining meter in this game is rather weird, you can get it from blocking attacks or charging it yourself. When you reach low health and your bar flashes red, no matter where your meter is you have access to as many supers as you want, which sounds broken but against the computer it really isn't.
The main thing I like about this game is the presentation. Oh my God this game looks fantastic. Each stage has this opening transition which is really appealing, the psuedo-3D wall in the Mexico stage being my favorite. The character sprites look rather goofy compared to what KOF '96-'03 would establish, but since this is the first entry it makes sense for the art style to look a bit experimental. A visually fantastic game even all these years later.
But man, this game's soundtrack. The arcade ost is pretty good, but the arranged soundtrack? Pure bliss on my ears. For an early CD quality audio video game soundtrack, the actual instruments and such used here sound fantastic, and I believe are real instruments. It's a soundtrack that unexplainably gives me joy and other emotions, please experience it for yourself. The sound design is fascinating too, games on the Neogeo always had this satisfying crunch to it, and this game is a perfect example.
The main turnoff for this game is the difficulty. The AI even on the easiest setting can be absolutely atrocious, and you're locked to teams in this game, meaning you can't create your preferred setup. Some characters may give you more trouble then others, but it's when Rugal steps in that fairness is thrown out the window. Now, if you just crouch block and occasionally attack during his first phase, you'll do entirely fine. But that second phase is a total nightmare. I got extremely lucky and was able to time him out by being very careful with my sidesteps from his projectiles and retaliated accordingly. Some people can take up to an hour on this guy which I can't even imagine suffering through.
And so those are my main thoughts on KOF '94. KOF is undoubtedly one of my favorite video game series, and seeing its roots is fascinating. I would not recommend this game to any casual player, but if you're a decently big fan of the series, you owe it to yourself to beat '94 Rugal at least once.
To everyone who has been supporting my reviews, I give my greatest thanks. I never thought I'd make it this far and I hope that you'll continue to enjoy my reviews. Once again, thank you for reading, and I'll see you when I review The King Of Fighters '95.